Pat Bertram is the author of the suspense novels Light Bringer, Daughter Am I, More Deaths Than One, and A Spark of Heavenly Fire. Bertram is also the author of Grief: The Great Yearning, “an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.”

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Invoking the Spirits

August 17, 2014 — Pat Bertram

There is a restless spirit in my father’s house, where my sister and I are staying to care for him.

We think this spirit is my father’s. He doesn’t seem to have any interest in living, doesn’t particularly want to die. He is very agitated, doesn’t much want to do anything except sleep and drink Ensure, though he does get out of bed occasionally when a good golf game is on television.

This spirit could be our own spent spirits — taking care of someone who neither wants to live or die is exhausting, especially since he won’t do anything for himself, even though he is stronger than he thinks.

This spirit could even be my mother’s. My sister sometimes senses mother’s spirit here along with another ghost, though she doesn’t know who that other spirit is, perhaps someone from my father’s past. She wonders if the spirits are gathering in anticipation of my father’s end. Since I am not convinced anything conscious remains after we die, I don’t know what to think.

Still, tonight my sister and I did an invocation of the spirits — ours and our mother’s. Since she loved Bailey’s Irish Cream, we got a bottle in her honor, raised our glasses to her and asked her help in settling my father’s spirit.

(We only poured a little for her, but we told her if she drank it, we’d give her more.)

And if this invocation doesn’t work, well, we have the rest of the bottle of Irish spirits to imbibe to bring peace of a sort to ourselves. I’m not much of a drinker, have had perhaps one drink in the past four or five years, but since this is a spiritual quest, I will do my part in finishing the bottle.

So, if you have any Bailey’s Irish Cream on hand (or if you need an excuse to buy a small bottle), please raise a glass in my parents’ honor.

I’m happy to have an excuse to go and get some Bailey’s. Love the stuff. It might be exactly what you need to get a restful night. Enjoy, and if the spirits gather, welcome them. Your sis has the right idea.

Since I’m one of those who have had an experience with a spirit I do believe they sometimes visit. But I don’t believe they travel back and forth on some fantastical mystic highway on whims. However, I can readily see that you might indeed have spirits loose in your house.

It’s entirely possibly that your mother’s spirit is around, due to the horrible times surrounding your family these last few months. If so, I hope she is able to do come good, that your father is able to quiet himself to hear her.

When my grandmother died, I was 7 years old. I didn’t really understand what had happened to my grandma. But my folks left me to stay with my grandpa, to be of some comfort to him and to keep him from losing himself in grief and drink. The night after the funeral I did something entirely out of character for me. I was terrified of the dark and yet, I got up and went to sit behind my grandma’s chair in the dead of night, no lights on, the house dark. While sitting there I felt my grandma’s hand on my shoulder and heard her say that she was all right, everything was fine and I should go back to bed. So I did.

Since then I never doubted that people came back from the dead. Indeed, it never occurred to me that everyone didn’t know that too. Imagine my surprise when I finally realized that other people didn’t know that the dead sometimes come to help the living.

Anyway, here’s a drink to your mother and your father. And even more so, a drink to you, dear Pat. May your troubles subside and life becomes a little bit more normal…whatever that means.😀

I hope we can get together one day soon. We don’t live so far apart, it shouldn’t be that difficult.

I love that you wrote a short story on my blog. Although I don’t believe in spirits, probably because I have no sensitivity to them, I always respect other people’s belief and think the stories of their experiences wonderful. And yes, we will meet. I look forward to that day.

Sounds like a state of limbo… a strange place to inhabit and can lead to that sort of restlessness – I feel for you and would be thinking along the same lines as your sister. It’s probably instinctual! Best wishes…

Books by Pat Bertram

Available online wherever books and ebooks are sold.

Grief: The Great Yearning is not a how-to but a how-done, a compilation of letters, blog posts, and journal entries Pat Bertram wrote while struggling to survive her first year of grief. This is an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.

When twenty-five-year-old Mary Stuart learns she inherited a farm from her recently murdered grandparents -- grandparents her father claimed had died before she was born -- she becomes obsessed with finding out who they were and why someone wanted them dead.

In quarantined Colorado, where hundreds of thousands of people are dying from an unstoppable, bio-engineered disease, investigative reporter Greg Pullman risks everything to discover the truth: Who unleashed the deadly organism? And why?

Bob Stark returns to Denver after 18 years in SE Asia to discover that the mother he buried before he left is dead again. At her new funeral, he sees . . . himself. Is his other self a hoaxer, or is something more sinister going on?

Thirty-seven years after being abandoned on the doorstep of a remote cabin in Colorado, Becka Johnson returns to try to discover her identity, but she only finds more questions. Who has been looking for her all those years? And why are those same people interested in fellow newcomer Philip Hansen?